Friday, August 4, 2017

Staunton, August 4 – Many in the
Baltic countries and elsewhere still celebrate the US non-recognition policy
which specified that Washington would never recognize Stalin’s “forcible incorporation”
of the three Baltic states into the USSR, a policy that send a clear message to
Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians that they were not alone in their fight
for freedom.

But at the same time, some of them
have asked over the years why the US did not do more to support the Baltic
peoples and their aspirations -- even though US policy did not ever promise to take
any actions to liberate the three occupied countries, a point Washington was
consistent about from 1940 to 1991.

In fact, however, as some newly
declassified CIA documents show, the US government not only carefully kept track
of “the forest brothers,” as the underground armed resistance to Soviet power there
in the late 1940s and early 1950s was known, but provided some limited covert
assistance to these groups.

Like the NATO film released about
the forest brothers a month ago, these documents have attracted Moscow’s
attention. One commentary by Sergey Orlov of Svobodnaya pressa posted online yesterday directly states that with
these documents, “the US has acknowledged its role in the support of ‘the [Baltic]
forest brothers’” (svpressa.ru/politic/article/178280/).

In Orlov’s words, the documents show
that “the CIA provided the anti-Soviet underground in the Baltic countries
organizational and financial help … and from this it follows in particular,” he
continues, “that in August 1950, the CIA approved the financing of ‘the forest
brothers.’”

“The total sum is not clear,” the Svobodnaya pressa writer says, “but in
1953, 134,950 dollars was devoted to one of the projects for assistance to the anti-Soviet
underground. Money was also allocated to the support of anti-Soviet Baltic
media beyond the borders of the USSR, he organization of a unity conference in the
US, and other goals.”

Orlov does not suggest that the US
provided the forest brothers with lethal aid, something he would surely have
done if there was anything in the documents to suggest that.But what he does say about the documents may
be far more important to an understanding of the complex picture of life in
Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania at that time.

First, he makes it clear that the
Central Intelligence Agency was extremely well-informed about the nature and
composition of the forest brothers. Second, Orlov’s selective quotations
indicate that Washington was extremely cautious in taking any steps that might
inflame the situation and cause Moscow to crack down even harder than it already
was at that time.

And third, Orlov mentions that the
Americans were not the only people fishing in these troubled waters at the
time.He notes that Stalin’s secret
police chief Lavrenty Beriya tried to reach an agreement of some kind with a
leader of the anti-Soviet underground in Lithuania whom the NKVD had arrested.

What the two discussed is “unknown,”
the commentator says; but after Beria was arrested, interrogated and then shot
in 1953, this Lithuanian, Jonas-Vytautas Zemaitis, was shot in Moscow’s Butyrka
prison on November 26, 1954, on the basis of a decision by the Supreme Court of
the Lithuanian SSR.

Zemaitis is now considered a hero in
Lithuania, and there is a monument to him at the Lithuanian defense ministry,
Orlov says. But that raises a bigger question: is Orlov’s article really about events
of almost 70 years ago, or is it really about the present-day agenda of Moscow
which remains interested in destabilizing the situation there.

If the latter – and there is every reason
to suspect that – this conclusion suggests Moscow will use the further release and
translation of US documents as the occasion not only to try to blacken the
reputation of the Americans but also to talk about contacts between Baltic
leaders in the past and the Soviet secret services in order to sow discord in
the three countries.